I could not find it either. It looks like an older model that was being closed out at BB. Yes I got it for 85 but not sure if it is worth it or to spend the extra and get the av model from ebay or amazon. And yes it is new in box as far as I can tell not opened. Checked again and the model# is correct.

I could not find it either. It looks like an older model that was being closed out at BB. Yes I got it for 85 but not sure if it is worth it or to spend the extra and get the av model from ebay or amazon. And yes it is new in box as far as I can tell not opened. Checked again and the model# is correct.

It will probably work but you may have to run wdidle3 on it, which requires connecting it to your computer via SATA. A USB connection won't work.

Unless you're planning return it, you could always try it in the Roamio and see.

I often go this route, as I can often get the external for ~$40 less than the bare drive that is inside, both retail and mail-order, like Newegg.

I've done it with TiVo HD, TiVo Premiere, and TiVo Roamio base.

The internal drive will be a 3TB WD30EZRX, unless WD isn't being consistent with what they put inside (in my experience, they have been consistent). That is a Green drive, without the unnecessary AV features (no TiVo, to date, uses that feature set). The EZRX line, however, does not support AAM (acoustic management), so forget trying to change the settings. The fans in my base Roamios sound like mini jet engines, at all times, no matter what drive is in them (I've tried many), so you need not worry about being able to hear the drive seeking. The fan noise is less insanity-invoking with the low-profile stock Seagate 500GB drives. But that's not what this thread is about. It's about upgrades.

Other than a year shorter warranty, for being an external drive, I see no downside. If you take your time, and use the right tools, you can open and re-close the enclosure, with zero signs of tampering, should the drive fail within warranty.

An added bonus is being able to use the enclosure with other low operating temperature WD (Green/Red) drives you may have laying around. This particular enclosure doesn't encrypt the drive contents, and seems to work with any modern WD drive. I often just use the SATA to USB bridge board, and not the plastic case.

It will if you take the internal drive out and use that. I've done it with TiVo HD, TiVo Premiere, and TiVo Roamio base. The internal drive will be a 3TB WD30EZRX, unless WD isn't being consistent with what they put inside (in my experience, they have been consistent). I often go this route, as I can often get the external for ~$40 less than the bare drive that is inside, both retail and mail-order, like Newegg. Other than a year shorter warranty, for being an external drive, I see no downside. If you take your time, and use the right tools, you can open and re-close the enclosure, with zero signs of tampering, should the drive fail within warranty. An added bonus is being able to use the enclosure with other low operating temperature WD (Green/Red) drives you may have laying around. This particular enclosure doesn't encrypt the drive contents, and seems to work with any modern WD drive. I often just use the SATA to USB bridge board, and not the plastic case.

That will work. It's not the best price, and you don't need SATA3 (nor will having it make any difference, for better or for worse), but if "Will it work?" is the only question. That drive will work just as well as any other Green drive.

I've already stated the "AV" line isn't necessary, just preferred by most (one year longer warranty being the biggest reason).

I've decided that I'm going with WD Red NAS, so long as I find them at near-equal or lesser price, for all my future DVR and NAS needs. WD Red NAS drives have many elements: Green (despite being called Red), low-heat, quiet, low-vibration, 3-year warranty, and the best performance you'll get from a "green" low-RPM drive. They also support the ATA streaming command feature set (AV-rated), but I could care less about that. They also are designed to work in RAID arrays, which Green and Green-AV drives don't work well, if at all, in, if you decide to use them for one. I almost forgot to mention 3-year warranty.

The thing that finally pried the paper books out of my cold, old hands was Stephen King's "Under The Dome". High mileage, carry on luggage business traveler and a week out of town's reading fitting into my briefcase.....when I finally accepted them, Kindle readers came as a relief.

If someone else already point this out in this long thread then feel free to ignore this. For anyone else reading this thread, on Windows you can use Diskpart.exe to clean a drive - no special utility needed.

Personally, because I'm paranoid (and have wiped out drives I didn't mean to in the past!) I use the Windows graphical disk management utility to verify the disk number. Once you use the clean command on a disk it's done - wiped out! So a little paranoia can be a healthy thing

Once I have confirmed the disk number for the disk I want to clean, I launch an elevated command prompt, type diskpart, type select disk x where x is the disk I want to clean. I type list disk to ensure that the disk I really want is selected (has an asterix next it) and that the size and everything matches what I want (measure twice, cut once) and then finally type clean.

That's it - there is NO warning so be doubly sure you select the right disk! Once cleaned the drive should work in your Tivo with no problem. Type exit to exit diskpart and then type exit again to close the command line shell if you are done with it. Power down and move the drive into your Tivo and enjoy!

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Tivo Roamio and Tivo Mini - woot!
Tivo Premiere - probably to be replaced by another Mini
Series 3 - On the way out the door
Tivo HD - On the way out the door

That was a great deal, and I seriously considered getting the Pro - but at the end of the day I stuck with the basic because I may still ditch cable and just go over the air. I was elated to see OTA come back at least in the Roamio basic!

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Tivo Roamio and Tivo Mini - woot!
Tivo Premiere - probably to be replaced by another Mini
Series 3 - On the way out the door
Tivo HD - On the way out the door

TiVo can, and sometimes will, refuse to provide support to you, open support tickets, or even take bug reports, if they notice you have changed drives.

The ONLY time I have EVERY seen someone complained about Tivo refusing them service, the person involved was (by their own admission) acting as a jerk to Tivo support and tried to get support for their modified Tivo. Well duh!

I've been a Tivo owner for over a decade and every Tivo I have owned was modified. On a number of occasions where I have had to get support as long as I returned the original drive to the Tivo before sending it in or getting detailed with tech support I **NEVER** have had them even bring it up, although they OBVIOUSLY can see that the Tivo's have been modified by the logs that get sent back to Tivo.

Here's the deal - Tivo is at least smart enough to understand that their enthusiast community is small enough to not be worth hassling over drive upgrades, especially when this enthusiast community is probably the best unpaid advertising and support network they have! For them to quibble with someone over a drive upgrade that person has to be acting in a very stupid manner. Yup, there is no guarantee that they won't suddenly get stupid - but given their stance of being VERY hands off for over a decade, I'll take the risk. So far the only issues I have ever had with my Tivo's are with hard drives which are, especially now, ridiculously easy to swap. One of my parents modified Tivo's had a bad power supply, but I just slapped the original hard drive in it, shipped it back and Tivo replaced it and transferred their lifetime to the replacement with no questions asked.

The biggest problem I see with getting support from modified Tivo's comes from a lack of common sense and decency on the part of those having problems in getting support

__________________
Tivo Roamio and Tivo Mini - woot!
Tivo Premiere - probably to be replaced by another Mini
Series 3 - On the way out the door
Tivo HD - On the way out the door

Season Passes can be backed up and then restored with kmttg. TiVo has an online Season Pass Manager (I call it SP "Mangler", since it copies them in a random order).

I was concerned about this as I moved around a bunch of season passes today, forgetting about the random order crap

I was about to go in and reorder everything when I realized my Tivo now has four tuners. I browsed the to do list - not one conflict with over 70 season passes that got randomized - woot! I think reordering season passes is now a thing of the past for me (especially since I very, very rarely watch any network television).

__________________
Tivo Roamio and Tivo Mini - woot!
Tivo Premiere - probably to be replaced by another Mini
Series 3 - On the way out the door
Tivo HD - On the way out the door

Popped a 2TB Seagate Barracuda (ST2000DM001) into my Roamio Basic. When I plugged everything in, all I got were alternating blinking lights on the front (green and amber together, then the red) -- no picture on the TV. Opened everything back up again and reseated the drive, thinking the SATA connection might've been loose. Plugged it back in and got exactly the same behavior. Proceeded to put the original drive back in, and all is well -- normal start and operation.

Obviously a problem with the Seagate drive, correct? I know it's not "optimized" for a Tivo, but I got it super cheap and figured it'd be worth a shot. Assuming it's not DOA, I shouldn't have to do anything special with the drive before plugging it in, correct? It should just work?

Normally I'd test the drive with a dock to my computer, but unfortunately we just moved and most of my stuff is in storage Anyone have ideas before I (sadly) RMA this baby? My Roamio is already 70% full, so I'm jonesing to get more storage!

Popped a 2TB Seagate Barracuda (ST2000DM001) into my Roamio Basic. When I plugged everything in, all I got were alternating blinking lights on the front (green and amber together, then the red) -- no picture on the TV. Opened everything back up again and reseated the drive, thinking the SATA connection might've been loose. Plugged it back in and got exactly the same behavior. Proceeded to put the original drive back in, and all is well -- normal start and operation.

Obviously a problem with the Seagate drive, correct? I know it's not "optimized" for a Tivo, but I got it super cheap and figured it'd be worth a shot. Assuming it's not DOA, I shouldn't have to do anything special with the drive before plugging it in, correct? It should just work?

Normally I'd test the drive with a dock to my computer, but unfortunately we just moved and most of my stuff is in storage Anyone have ideas before I (sadly) RMA this baby? My Roamio is already 70% full, so I'm jonesing to get more storage!

No you shouldn't but I ran across some of these cheap drives from a particular on line auction site. They were called new (and they were) but as I found out troubleshooting days later, they were made for a particular company with a slightly modified firmware that prevented it from working in the TiVo. This was verified by a long talk with Seagate. I bought a retail version of the drive and had no problems.

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"Delay is preferable to error" - Thomas Jefferson
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" - Sir Isaac Newton

When I plugged everything in, all I got were alternating blinking lights on the front (green and amber together, then the red) -- no picture on the TV.

Other than jmbach's advice, the only thing I can recommend is putting the drive in your computer and trying to use the clean command from diskpart.exe (if you use windows). I detail how a few posts back from this one. Others also reference some other disk cleaning/zeroing utilities. Or if on a Mac/Linux you can use dd to fill the drive with zeros - letting it run for a few minutes to overwrite the beginning would probably be more than sufficient.

__________________
Tivo Roamio and Tivo Mini - woot!
Tivo Premiere - probably to be replaced by another Mini
Series 3 - On the way out the door
Tivo HD - On the way out the door

And why I came back to this thread - no one has figured out how to expand to 4TB yet, eh? Oh well - I have some extra 3TB drives (or at least drives that can be freed from my NAS easily) and that's more than enough - it would be nice to start off with 4 without it costing a premium.

__________________
Tivo Roamio and Tivo Mini - woot!
Tivo Premiere - probably to be replaced by another Mini
Series 3 - On the way out the door
Tivo HD - On the way out the door

The ONLY time I have EVERY seen someone complained about Tivo refusing them service, the person involved was (by their own admission) acting as a jerk to Tivo support and tried to get support for their modified Tivo. Well duh!

................

It happened to me back in 2007 when the TiVo HD launched.
It was a brand new TiVoHD and I was not being a jerk. But they refused to go through any troubleshooting because they could see that the hard drive had been upgraded. So I put the original drive back in, and took it back to circuit city where I exchanged it. Then with the new TiVo they said they would trouble shoot the issue.

Of course the issue had nothing to do with the hardware, it was a software issue so exchanging the box did not fix anything. The TiVo sent out mono audio from analog channels. The TiVo engineers thought it was fine since there was audio coming out of both channels. But it was actually the same info coming out of both speakers instead of different audio like it should be with a stereo signal. Anyway I got FiOS shortly after that which solved the problem since FiOS was all digital, unlike Comcast at the time. They did fix it at some point because when I signed up one of my TiVos to Comcast over a year later to get some channels that FiOS didn't have, the audio problem didn't exist any more.

No you shouldn't but I ran across some of these cheap drives from a particular on line auction site. They were called new (and they were) but as I found out troubleshooting days later, they were made for a particular company with a slightly modified firmware that prevented it from working in the TiVo. This was verified by a long talk with Seagate. I bought a retail version of the drive and had no problems.

I really appreciate the reply! I bought this from TD as a "bare" drive...no no retail box. The firmware and model numbers check out, but your theory is an interesting one, so I might investigate further. Thanks again!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DocNo

Other than jmbach's advice, the only thing I can recommend is putting the drive in your computer and trying to use the clean command from diskpart.exe (if you use windows). I detail how a few posts back from this one. Others also reference some other disk cleaning/zeroing utilities. Or if on a Mac/Linux you can use dd to fill the drive with zeros - letting it run for a few minutes to overwrite the beginning would probably be more than sufficient.

Thanks for your reply as well! I remembered that I had an old 1 TB external HDD laying around, so I opened the enclosure, took out the drive, and plugged in the new Seagate. Upon doing so, I downloaded the "SeaTools" suite to test it, and it did past the initial quick test (I also found out my laptop has a Seagate drive, which I did not know). After that short test, I completed the diskpart.exe procedure (thanks so much for your post above), but still no joy after plugging the drive back into the Tivo. I'm on a Windows laptop, so I'll probably Google some procedures for zeroing the drive. Seems like the drive is probably OK in that it's recognized by Windows, but for whatever reason it doesn't want to play nicely with the Tivo. If all else fails, I guess I'll buy a new enclosure, NTFS the drive, and have a very cheap 2 TB external. No biggie. Wasted Saturday, though! Thanks again!